*/ On Nov. 6, 1869, two teams from East Coast universities took the field and kicked off a storied tradition. About 100 spectators cheered student-athletes from Princeton and Rutgers in what is regarded as the first collegiate football...

A summer bridge program that serves incoming college athletes who need it most has reached the four-year mark. For Eagles athletics administrators, that means one important thing: It’s graduation time.

Within a single offseason, what was viewed by many as a grimy, shadowy industry became an acceptable, if not admired, opportunity. That wasn’t merely surprising — it was an earth-shaking, worldview-shifting moment.

After a pair of unsuccessful attempts over the past decade to recalibrate Division III’s sport regions, a Division III Conference Commissioners Association subcommittee convened in 2016 to try to succeed where other efforts had fallen short.

This fall, the first students receiving educational dollars from the NCAA Division I Former Student-Athlete Degree Achievement Program will begin classes to reach a goal they didn’t achieve the first time around: a college degree.

With roughly 4 million former NCAA student-athletes around the world working in industries as varied as health care, engineering and finance, helping them find one another and build career connections is a big task.